06 June 2011

What is the TFS (Iteration) Automation Platform?

One of the privileges I’ve had over the past couple of years has been the opportunity to work on several Visual Studio ALM Rangers projects. Rangers projects provide the opportunity to interact with some very talented people on a daily basis. Some of those people might by on the Visual Studio product group, others might be Microsoft employees in other areas, and others might be external Rangers – e.g. Microsoft MVPs or other contributors. Add in various time zones across the planet and your typical Rangers project can turn out to be a great, yet rewarding, challenge.

Most recently, I have become involved with a new Rangers project – TFS Iteration Automation. This project is a little different from the typical Rangers project, however. With this project, the first deliverable will provide some core functionality for handling the maintenance associated with switching from iteration-to-iteration in TFS 2010 (especially in regards to query updates).

The second release will be a community project (although still owned and driven by external Rangers). The idea being that the platform provided by the first release will allow for myriad add-ins to be built and provided in the second release.

This is an exciting Rangers project because it will provide a base platform for building, and deploying, various extensions to TFS 2010.

Martin Hinshelwood (Dev Lead) has provided several posts explaining the basic idea and concepts describing this project. If you’re interested in learning more about this project, check out these posts: